Humanoid

Okay but do you honesty think people wouldn't buy a major RPG just because there was mandatory but well written Romance? Are people that opposed to the idea of Romance which would only be a small part of the RPG experience anyway? In a word, yes. In more words, it doesn't matter how well a romance is written, it's impossible to make a character that appeals to everyone. A mandatory romance assumes everyone will react the same way to a given character, which is nothing but pure folly. I have quit games outright after being presented by an unpalatable forced decision or characterisation. With foreknowledge I would not have purchased the game at all, but it's hard to discover the nature of said events without spoiling the game. Foreknowledge that romances are mandatory, on the other hand, will be easy, and consign the game to the do-not-play list. P.S. Oh god, imagine ME2 had a forced Miranda romance. That's the worst example I can think of, of a case where the developers completely misanticipated the player reaction to their headline character.

As bold a move as copying all the other aspects of WoW, yes. It's totally going to work this time guys!

Yeah, and that supposed majority of people are people who would buy the game anyway. Conversely, the people firmly against it might end up not buying the game. Sure, that might not be a huge number, but then it only needs to be measured against the number of new customers who buy the game when they wouldn't have otherwise, a demographic which I think would be very very small indeed. So no, it's hard to see any possible circumstance in which that would be a good idea economically.

Isn't that how you make beef jerky?

AutoHotKey itself is a legitimate program, however, so just grab it from the official website and you're golden.

Actually I hear the new Garrett largely can't climb many walls anyway. Or even jump, except for a few select places.

That's like making a game based solely around ME2's planet scanning or Oblivion's persuasion minigame, is it not?

Counterpoint: generic elf lady they're using for marketing. While not in itself definitive evidence of anything, I feel it does kind of illustrate where the priorities were here - making a traditional generic MMO with pretty elves the likes of which you see by the dozen in "beautiful elves" type project on the Nexusmods site. Disclosure: In general I'm not a fan of the TES setting, but one aspect I do admire is their willingness to have these non-traditional (relatively), very alien elves compared to your stock fantasy setting.

In case you missed it, the developers did at least explain their decision. It might sound like a joke, but nope, it's the real way their thought processes operated (or didn't operate, as the case may be). http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-04-03-thief-dev-explains-why-it-ditched-original-garrett-voice-actor

Yeah, and the "waiting for Titanfall" game would be like the "waiting for SimCity" server fail game. :D

Uninstall then smash the disc to pieces.

Oh right, yeah, the boxed copies will contain Steam keys. Do note however, that there is a region lock on the activation of some keys, e.g. you can't activate a key from a US box to a European Steam account without using a VPN.

This is a Steamworks game, not a Uplay game, so yes, you can. Buying from the Steam store as a gift will result in a giftable copy in your Steam inventory. Buying from another digital games reseller (such as GreenManGaming or GamersGate) will just give you a Steam key that your friend can redeem.

Angela Merkel?

I studied some form of computing and am therefore on safe ground as male and female connector plugs occur in almost 1:1 proportions.

Is that statement intended to be one of praise for those two games, or a subtle damning of the third game?

How do you set a curriculum? a) Cover the events of history by order of significance and explore their protagonists by their roles in said event. b) Select figures of history by their physiology (not just gender) in proportions according to some set quota, then explore what events each happened to be involved in. I think the perception that the latter is happening in some institutions is what's mainly drawing ire here.

Remember how Bloodlines abruptly falls off a cliff about two-thirds in? Lionheart falls off the cliff about a quarter* of the way in, as soon as you leave the initial city. * Never played it through so it's a rough guess, someone who's suffered through it can probably give a better estimate.

Also better without darkspawn and demons and whatnot. And elves, obviously.

I'm concerned that I have to walk two miles off the beaten road to use the services. How am I supposed to hold it in that long?

If you're referring to storyline or dialogue choices, then I don't really consider that to be a defining or essential feature of the genre. All RPGs have to have some kind of numerical progression in place, but not all of them have to have storyline and dialogue choices. A lot of the old RPGs didn't even have much of a storyline or dialogue at all, let alone choices to make. Choices are just something that has been taken from the adventure genre later on and added to RPGs in order to give them more flavour and complexity. It doesn't matter how you interpret such choices, they are by no means a defining feature of an RPG on their own. Those old games were rubbish and something I'm glad we've left behind. Less bluntly and therefore less in keeping with this topic title, plenty of PnP RPG sessions end without a single dice being rolled. That's not to say they have no conditionals or element of chance, but the variables aren't really numerical as such. I mean technically you could have a gender stat that's either 0 or 1 I guess - or indeed 0.5. (Perhaps disconcertingly, I'm enjoying indulging my inner Volourn in this way)

I for one am glad Bruce doesn't type with the inflections of the South African accent.

He's the secret super-difficult undocumented romance option, one wrong dialogue choice and it's over, you're locked out forever.

I don't remember anything at all about Fallout 3's DRM, which is probably the kindest thing I can say about it. I mean I have the disc edition, but if not for people in recent times talking about how the shutdown of GFWL would affect the game, I wouldn't have even pegged it as having GFWL. That said, it's partly because as a utterly terrible game, I may have only actually launched it a few times and absent-mindedly clicked whatever prompts it had away. The only game in my list I can say I know involved GFWL is Street Fighter 4, but I clicked away all the prompts there too - and again it's a game I've barely played.

An RPG is just an adventure game where you get to choose options not because they're correct but because they're in character. You want some degree of persistence in an RPG, but it need not be in the form of stats or any other numerical scale, it simply needs to track those past options, be they binary, ternary or n-ary.